Bill Gates Still Believes In A Carbon Tax

Bill Gates didn't say if we get a carbon tax, he said when we get a carbon tax:

"When we get a carbon tax we should put some of that into innovation," Gates told energy executives gathered at Houston's IHS CERAWeek conference Thursday evening.

Gates also pushed innovation during a question and answer session Thursday, and continued to press his case for increased government spending on energy research and development. It's a case he made most strongly in a 2011 editorial for the journal Science, written on behalf of The American Energy Innovation Council.

Gates serves on the Council, which issued a report in 2010 calling for the federal government to increase funding for energy research to $16 billion per year (Instead, funding declined from $3.5 billion in 2011 to $3.4 billion in 2012, according to the Congressional Budget Office).

"The report also suggests ways to pay for the increased investment," Gates writes in Science: "reducing or eliminating current subsidies to well-established energy industries, diverting a portion of royalties from domestic energy production, collecting a small fee on electricity sales, or imposing a price on carbon."

But the best shot for a carbon tax right now is described as "a long shot" by the Mother Nature Network. Senators Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer introduced their Climate Protection Act on Valentine's Day. It would set a cap on carbon emissions and impose a $20 fee per ton of CO2 over the cap, increasing 5.6 percent annually over the following decade until it reaches about $33.

"Despite the growing urgency of climate change, however, the bill still faces dismal odds of becoming law," according to Russell McLendon of Mother Nature Network. "The Senate already failed to pass a 2009 House-approved cap-and-trade bill — one of two major climate bills that chamber has rejected in the past decade — and the Republican-led House is now unlikely to even consider the Sanders-Boxer bill."

The White House, too, has ruled out a carbon tax. And in his State of Union Address, Obama repeated the strategy he has pursued since 2009, calling for Congress to enact a market-based solution like cap-and-trade, and stressing his right to act without Congress:

"I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy."

Former EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson laid the groundwork for administrative action when she declared carbon dioxide a pollutant in 2009. As if to underscore his threat, Obama replaced the retiring Jackson with the head of the EPA office that regulates air pollution, Gina McCarthy.

It seems clear to most observers that carbon regulation will come through the Clean Air Act, if at all, only to be tied up in the courts.

Has Bill Gates lost touch with political reality? Is he engaging in wishful thinking? Or does he know something we don't know?